Error messages in ptr+length languages
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Assessment
- Difficulty
- 5/5
- Estimated time
- Over a week
- Newbie friendliness
- 20/100
Research direction
Start with the ARF translation example in the issue and examine how ptr+length mutation, such as appending .txt, causes validation failures and confusing displayed names. Compare the three proposed error-message approaches and clarify the expected behavior before implementation; done means the project has a decided approach for these validation errors.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Description
@alexcrichton pointed out that the error messages the current scheme will evoke will be unfortunate in ptr+length languages such as Rust in some cases where the Rust program has mutated the ARF string in an ARF-unaware way.
For an ARF translation like "hello\xffworld" => "\u{feff}hello�world\0hello\0\x7fworld", if Rust code appends a suffix such as ".txt", it'll produce "\u{feff}hello�world\0hello\0\x7fworld.txt". In this case, the embedded NUL will trigger ARF validation, and the validation will fail since the second half ends with ".txt" and the first half doesn't. A typical error message will include the name, which in this case will display as "hello�worldhelloworld.txt", which may confuse users.
Some brainstorming:
- Encode the entire second half in non-printing characters?
- Encode strings in the second half as something like base64 which would be printing but less likely to be mistaken for a corrupted string? We could get it to print as something like "hello�world-aGVsbG8gd29ybGQK.txt".
- Leave it as is?
- Dominant language
- C
- Stars
- 16
- Forks
- 0
- PR merge metrics
- No merged PRs in 30d
Contributor guide
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First steps
- Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
- Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
- Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
- Open a pull request that references the issue number.
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